16 mikrokosmos

I wish you were here
beside me, I'd talk until you were dizzy.

___from After Laforgue by John Tranter








untitled, by batak


___1.
'take two more.'
fitting words for drunks, addicts, hungry deserters
and unsupervised children.


___2.
'it was a fitting end'.
yes. __well. , even Orestes
___when paused his marathon to catch his breath
found a funeral prepared and an impatient procession
ready to bump him into the hole.


___3.
the child asks his mother to explain her mood to him.
wherefore she sits him upon her lap,
in utter silence, occasionally lightly blowing some air
over his ear ; so that he shivered with something not quite fright.
but not quite anything else either.


___4.
do you have a coffee table in your room? yes. and lamps? yes.
anything else? yes. it must be very festive, could you describe it?
visualize the moon.


___5.
_but he eventually found a solution.
he'd sit in a tree. a long while.
eventually he'd snap out of his trance and
accidentally go to step out from his perch.


___6.
laid out on the cold kitchen tiles
still.
right hand holding a bottle of soda on his belly,
upright and half full.
___'the refrigerator claims to be the return of 2007'
he says eventually.
still staring at the ceiling. (or behindyond


___7.
do you really wish i was there? what would you say to make me dizzy?
__

___8.
after sunset, they found three shopping carts at the edge of the parking lot,
filled them with incendiaries: books of old, gasoline, remembrances of things lost(found)
__
and laughed until the sun became too embarrassed to compete.

and danced,

_________breathing in fumes and spitting ashes.


___9.
do you really wish i was besides you? what would you say to make me dizzy?


___10.
'this is wrong, the queen of hearts is a duck,
and the heart is green'
___but he kept smoking and didn't look up at her


___11.
where are your glasses?
they must be wherever i left my eyes.


___12.
in this other world, where we're not allergic to cats and kisses aren't about infections,[1]
it snows for breakfast and we waltz on trains and sleep at night.
we fold up papers we don't like, kiss one corner, and attach them back onto trees -
so that our bank debts and breakups go from being lifelessly pale to engorged in nectar and their featureless expressions remember their ridges and folds ; in autumn they dream in red otherwise in green, and when the wind comes they remember to waive.
___in this other world, there is a seat besides me on every bus, reserved for you.


___13.
what would you say to make me dizzy?
___that love is time's child.
___hold my cold hand longer, maybe the lines on its palm point to you.


___14.
what would you say to make me dizzy?
___that i have failed at being a man because i have hidden the feathers of my wings in my socks.


___15.
when her teacher became worried she was speaking nonsense, they called in an expert.
'what do you mean little girl' she asked?
'these are brutal times. the fault-line revolution continues : this week's natural disaster is brought to you by Peru. Haiti. Vesuvius.
the women are beat. the men are poor.
the oil in the water is the blood of lambs and the silent stories even Oprah hasn't heard'.


___16.
in this other world

everybody's got to be somewhere

to make you dizzy i'd kiss your eyelid and exhale a blue breath you could save to remember me by in the blue Jupiter of your blue eye, and in your sleep i'd draw connecting lines between your freckles - in the evening the cosmos of the nightsky would smile at you as though a mirror, and then i'd jump up and down like when i'm excited and you'd hold my shoulders down until i'd demand the jetpacks we were promised and i'd blast off to

Everybody's got to be somewhere.

Save the last chance for me. [2]


*___*___*
[1] Where the Boys Are, John Tranter
[2] Sign Under Test, Charles Bernstein
__